Amy and Isabelle

  But instead the rain simply fell more steadily, tapping down now on rooftops and cars and pavement, and those people who had woken in the night fell back asleep and slept deeply, for the sky did not lighten the way it usually did; it became only as light as evening. By morning there were puddles beneath gutter pipes, small pools in gravel driveways. The rain was dark and heavy and rattled down onto porch railings, front steps. People ate their breakfasts by lamplight, or in the kitchen light of overhead fluorescent bulbs. For some it was reminiscent of times when they had woken early to travel somewhere far that day; it held that same kind of anticipatory air, although they were not going anywhere but to work on this dark August morning.

  Isabelle, having been one of those who woke briefly in the night, had slept again deeply and soothingly. Though now awake in the kitchen with the windowpanes a darkened wet, she felt phlegmy and stunned, as though she had taken sleep medication that had not worn off yet. She sat with her fingers lightly placed around her coffee cup, thinking how strange it was that she had slept soundly when she had gone to bed with disturbing thoughts shooting across her mind. How strange to have been sitting in her baking car yesterday with Dottie and Bev, and then in Dottie’s kitchen—how strange that had been. Strange to think of Avery Clark waking in a cabin right now on Lake Nattetuck. Strange, in fact, to think that both her mother and father were dead, that perhaps this very rain was pelting down on their graves, which were only two hours away; that the small farmhouse she had been raised in belonged to another family, had belonged to them for years.

  Strange to think her daughter lay upstairs right now in bed, her full-grown limbs sprawled across the sheet, when for so many, many mornings (it had seemed) little Amy had woken before Isabelle, padding across the hall in her pajamas with their plastic-soled feet, the snapped waistband moist from the diaper that sagged soggily beneath; she would stand patiently, so little that her head was even with the bed, and wait for Isabelle’s eyes to open. How strange when you were not beautiful yourself to have a beautiful daughter.

  Here Isabelle drank her coffee down quickly. She needed to wake herself up, get to work. Carrying her cup to the sink, seeing through the window the dark trunks of the pine trees glistening with rain, she was aware of anticipation making its way through the blank odd “strangeness” that had enveloped her since getting up this morning.

  What was it? she wondered, placing her coffee cup carefully in the sink, tightening the cloth belt of her bathrobe. It was not that she was looking forward to going back to work (why would she, when everyone there was losing her mind, and Avery was still away?), but there was some—well, “eagerness” was too strong a word—but some desire to bathe and dress and leave the house, as though another place waited where she belonged.

  AND THERE WAS no doubt about it: Bev and Dottie were her friends. Every time Dottie walked by Isabelle’s desk she would reach down and lightly touch Isabelle’s arm. At lunchtime Fat Bev saved Isabelle a seat in the lunchroom, indicating with a nod that Isabelle should sit in this particular chair; and once seated, with Dottie on her other side, Isabelle found herself offered a stunning assortment of foods.

  “Got to fatten you two up,” Fat Bev murmured. “So pretend we’re having a picnic.” And she spread out on the table an array of hardboiled eggs, pickles, carrot sticks, fried chicken, two small packages of cookies, and three brownies in a wax-paper bag.

  Isabelle looked from the food to Fat Bev. “Eat,” Bev said.

  Isabelle ate a drumstick and a pickle. Dottie eyed one of the hardboiled eggs and said she might be able to manage that. “Be good if you could,” Fat Bev said, peeling it for her.

  “True,” Isabelle agreed, wiping chicken grease from her mouth. “Eggs are a great source of protein. Put a little salt on it, Dottie, and in three bites you’ll have it gone.”

  But halfway through Dottie started to panic, and it was Isabelle who saw this and understood; she knew how quickly a stomach could feel full, how resolute the gullet could become in shutting down, and when she saw Dottie gaze with a certain horror at the half-eaten egg in her hand—teeth marks streaked across the greenish yellow of the cakey yolk—Isabelle tapped her wrist with a carrot stick and said quietly, “Eat this instead.”

  The carrot stick made it down, and Isabelle, watching carefully, slipped her another, and that one went down too. Fat Bev observed this with approval, and when Dottie later ate a chocolate chip cookie and said how chocolate always made her want milk, Isabelle and Bev exchanged a look and Bev lumbered right over to one of the vending machines to push the button for a carton of milk. Dottie managed to drink half of it before getting full, and Isabelle, who had also eaten one of Bev’s chocolate chip cookies and was also feeling a desire for milk, in spite of her aversion to sharing drinks this way, poured the remainder in a paper cup and finished it off.

  Bev was delighted. “I’ll keep you two skinnies alive if it’s the death of me,” she said, lighting up a cigarette, inhaling with satisfaction, and something about this made all three of them laugh.

  “What’s the joke?” Arlene Tucker, from across the room, wanted to know.

  “No joke,” Bev said, one final chuckle moving her huge chest, from which she brushed some brownie crumbs.

  “Life,” Dottie Brown said, lighting her own cigarette, “the joke is life.” And they laughed again, though not so loudly as they had before.

  (At home, while the rain beat steadily against the windows, Amy watched, dull-eyed, the game shows that were on TV.)

  DOWN THE ROAD a mile Emma Clark stood in her hallway holding the telephone and motioning with her other hand for Avery to take the duffel bag of dirty laundry straight to the basement; she had to snap her fingers and point before he seemed to understand.

  “Of course they don’t care,” Emma said into the telephone, nodding yes to her husband that the brown suitcase could go upstairs. “They only care about the dollar bill,” and then she winced, because she was speaking to Carolyn Errin, the dentist’s wife, who herself, Emma thought, cared only for the dollar bill. But apparently Carolyn Errin had not taken umbrage at Emma’s remark about insurance companies, for she was already agreeing in her steady, irritated voice that the earrings were priceless because her father gave them to her the night before he died and who could put a price on that (“No one,” said Emma Clark, who had a headache, and hated arriving home from vacation in the rain), and the insurance company should only now be telling them these items weren’t covered, when the earrings had been stolen last March.

  “Oh, such incompetence,” said Emma, sitting down in the black chair by the telephone and thinking that Avery, like her, was subdued because of the girlfriend that John had brought to the cabin, brown-eyed Maureen, thin and intelligent and halfway through medical school. All very impressive, but something was not right.

  “You can’t believe anything the insurance company tells you,” Emma said to the dentist’s wife, “but I’ll have to call you back. Avery’s unpacking and I need to supervise.”

  But Carolyn Errin had one little question before she hung up: How did the visit with John’s new girlfriend go?

  “Lovely,” said Emma, standing up now, and leaning her head toward the phone in preparation for hanging up. “Lovely girl. She’s in medical school, you know.”

  Well, if they got married they’d have quite an income, wouldn’t they.

  “I’m sure that’s a long way down the line,” Emma said. “Bye, bye.”

  She was not the least bit sure it was a long way down the line. And this Maureen was simply not what Emma had in mind for her son. Emma opened the closet door and hung up a shirt. One would assume that a woman in medical school hoped to be a pediatrician, or go into obstetrics and deliver babies. But Maureen planned on being a gastroenterologist. Emma sat down on the bed. That kind of doctor looked at people’s rear ends all day long. And did more than look, Emma thought, moving the suitcase aside.

  “Tell me, Avery,” she said, as her husband came
into the bedroom, “as a male.”

  He looked at her with wariness.

  “Would you go to a woman gastroenterologist? If you needed one, I mean. ”

  “Oh, Lord,” he said, looking slightly abashed, sitting down on the bed beside her.

  Emma sighed, and they watched while the rain slid down the windows in front of them. “Why would anyone be that kind of doctor?” Emma demanded, thinking how they both felt invaded by a chilliness, an uneasiness, how their entire future seemed rocked somehow by this vigorous, slender Maureen.

  But then Avery said there was probably some canned stew they could heat up for dinner tonight, since the rain made it bothersome to go to the store. And they were making too much of the Maureen business; she was a nice girl. Besides, who said that John was going to marry her?

  Emma stood up. “Oh, he’ll marry her,” she said. “You wait and see.” She did not add that the children would be raised by a housekeeper and would therefore grow up anxious, or that John himself would be neglected over the years. No, she wasn’t going to say another word. Avery could just wait and see.

  ACROSS TOWN BARBARA Rawley, the deacon’s wife, sat down on her bed. The rain tapped steadily against the windowpane. From the family room below came the sounds of the television, and her son, Flip, hooting as he watched the baseball game.

  What she couldn’t get over was how the breast was gone. How simple it was. Just gone.

  She heard her husband speak to Flip, the footrest of his recliner squeaking into place. All that mattered was this: the happiness of her family.

  But still. Her breast was gone. She couldn’t seem to get over this, to believe it. She opened her bathrobe slowly, and stared. She stared and stared. The breast was gone.

  In its place was a long, red, raised line. The breast itself was simply gone.

  IN THE MORNING the rain let up slightly but it didn’t stop. Drivers still needed their wipers as they drove across the river—the squeaky rhythmic back-and-forth over the windshield, smearing, clearing; the rumble of the bridge beneath the tires; and beneath that the brown river, hard and unrelenting as it swerved around the rocks, as though the days of rain had returned to it some long forgotten arrogance.

  The sky, which since dawn had stayed an unvaried galvanized gray, now darkened perceptibly, and the rain tapped down steadily again, but faster. For anyone driving over the final pinning of the bridge and onto Mill Road it could easily seem the world was underwater; cars nosing down roads and turning into parking lots like so many slow-moving fish; clogged drainpipes on the edge of the road causing large and shallow ponds to form in places; trucks driving through sending up a sheet of spray. In the parking lot of the mill, people hurried through the rain wearing plastic hats, or holding umbrellas, their shoulders scrunched forward as they ducked inside the door.

  In the office room the lights were on, casting a yellowish hue onto the old wooden floor, and because the windows were shut against the rain, the room had a wintery feel to it, which was peculiar after a summer that had seemed it would never end, and in fact had not yet done so.

  Avery Clark did not show Isabelle any photographs of his week in the mountains on Lake Nattetuck. Nor did he offer any other accounts of his family’s vacation, except to acknowledge, rather dismissively, that yes, indeed, it had been raining there as well.

  “Oh, what a shame,” Isabelle said, from where she stood in the fishbowl doorway.

  “So you managed all right?” Avery said. He was poking around in a desk drawer. He glanced at her quickly. “No problems, I hope.”

  “Well … no.” She said this slowly, stepping inside his door. She was ready to tell him softly how there had been a bit of trouble with Lenora when she saw, or rather felt, that he was not interested. He was more than not interested—he did not want to know.

  “Good, then. Glad to hear it.” He tapped the edges of some papers on his desk, while his eyes glanced over his appointment book. “I’m sure with this break in the weather, everyone’s feeling better.”

  “Oh, I think so. For the most part. You know.” Through the glass wall of his office Isabelle could see Dottie Brown sitting at her desk. Not engaged in work or conversation, unaware of being observed, Dottie’s face had a fragile, naked look, like that of a child who had been everlastingly stunned, and it sent a shiver through Isabelle’s bones.

  Chapter

  22

  IT RAINED LIGHTLY for two more days and then the sky suddenly cleared just as darkness fell, leaving for a few moments a strip of luminescent afterglow along the horizon from a sunset that had not been seen. That night the stars came out, the whole array of them: Orion’s Belt, the Big and Little Dippers, the smudgings of the Milky Way, all were reassuringly there against the deep ocean of quiet sky.

  By early morning a delicate strip of clouds high overhead looked like a thin layer of frosting spread across the side of some blue ceramic bowl. Mourning doves cooed unseen in the fine light; cardinals and hermit thrushes darted from one tree to another, calling out. The dairy farmer’s wife, Mrs. Edna Thompson, stood on her back steps saying to no one in particular, “Listen to those birds,” and it did seem their morning chatter was more noticeable in this soft, surprising air.

  Still and all, it was remarkable after a summer of constant complaining how few people mentioned this change in the weather. It might have been because things simply seemed normal again, for lawns that had been tired-looking patches of brown had, in this week and a half of rain, found something green in themselves again; even the bark on the birch trees appeared refreshed and tender and clean, the leaves calmly hanging in the windless sun.

  By afternoon mothers could be found sitting on their front steps while children ran bare-legged down the sidewalks. Fathers arriving home from work felt like barbecuing again, and did, then sat on their porches till evening. In short, the traditions of summer were available again, and they brought over the next number of days certain combinations of comfort in the loamy smells of earth and in the wafting of barbecued meat, and in the ever-hopeful nostalgia that is felt sometimes in the scented air that hovers over newly cut grass.

  Barbara Rawley, breathing in this freshness as she stood in the kitchen doorway watching her husband return the lawn mower to the garage, thought of all the brave women out there in different parts of this vast country who faced each day wearing a gelatinous prosthesis tucked into their bras, and she thought it might be possible that she, too, could accept living this way.

  Lenny Mandel, driving down Main Street toward the apartment where Linda Lanier continued to entertain him so generously, felt capable of things decent and good, envisioned a future strolling the corridors gray-haired and with a commanding presence, principal of a school that would improve greatly under his concerned and sensitive care.

  It was the air, really—the clear brightness of the air that in the evenings now held the first chilliness of autumn, and brought with it that subtle undercurrent of old longings and new chances which autumn often brings. It was this, combined with the confidence given by her deepening friendship with Dottie Brown and Fat Bev, that started Isabelle thinking how she might invite Avery Clark and Emma to her house one evening for dessert.

  The thought, coming to her one night as she stood at the sink finishing the dishes, noticing with surprised satisfaction how very nice the kitchen looked with the geraniums on the windowsill, the patch of marigolds seen through the window catching the last of the evening’s sun—this thought, having arrived, grew larger, more prominent, and pushed other thoughts away. What she wanted, really, was to “look good” once again in Avery Clark’s eyes, which is why the sight of her attractive kitchen that night prompted the idea; she wanted to open herself, her life (even her house), to his inspection, to say, in effect, Avery, see how clean I have managed to be? See how, in spite of everything, I have survived my struggles? But she had to approach the question on its face: Was inviting the Clarks to her house an acceptable thing to do? At times it seemed it
was; they were neighbors, they went to the same church; it would be a merely friendly gesture. Perfectly all right.

  Other times it seemed ludicrous. (Was it ludicrous to invite your boss to your home?) She thought of telephoning her cousin Cindy Rae two hours away, but in order to have the situation weighed honestly she would have to include the sordid little piece of history involving Avery and Amy—and Emma’s subsequent gossip—and of course she wasn’t going to do that. No, she was on her own with this one, and she sat in the office room typing at her desk, losing her confidence, gaining it, losing it again.

  But leaving the ladies’ room one afternoon and unexpectedly finding herself alone in the hallway with Avery Clark, who was bending over the drinking fountain, Isabelle blurted out quietly, “Avery, I wondered if you and Emma would care to come over for dessert one night?”

  Avery straightened up and stared at her, a bit of water still clinging at the edge of his long, crooked mouth.

  “It was just an idea,” Isabelle said, faltering. “I just thought …” and here she raised her hand as though to stop the thought, or conversation, from going further.

  “Oh, no, no. No.” Avery wiped his mouth briefly, nervously, with the back of his hand. “Very hospitable of you.” He nodded, so clearly caught off guard that Isabelle, to her horror, felt her face grow red. “Very nice thought,” he said. “Let’s see. What night did you have in mind?”